Applying Seamful Design in Location-Based Mobile Museum Applications

The application of mobile computing is currently altering patterns of our behavior to a greater degree than perhaps any other invention. In combination with the introduction of power-efficient wireless communication technologies, such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), designers are today increasingly empowered to shape the way we interact with our physical surroundings and thus build entirely new experiences. However, our evaluations of BLE and its abilities to facilitate mobile location-based experiences in public environments revealed a number of potential problems. Most notably, the position and orientation of the user in combination with various environmental factors, such as crowds of people traversing the space, were found to cause major fluctuations of the received BLE signal strength. These issues are rendering a seamless functioning of any location-based application practically impossible. Instead of achieving seamlessness by eliminating these technical issues, we thus choose to advocate the use of a seamful approach, that is, to reveal and exploit these problems and turn them into a part of the actual experience. In order to demonstrate the viability of this approach, we designed, implemented, and evaluated the Ghost Detector —an educational location-based museum game for children. By presenting a qualitative evaluation of this game and by motivating our design decisions, this article provides insight into some of the challenges and possible solutions connected to the process of developing location-based BLE-enabled experiences for public cultural spaces.